


oh, the things we invent when we're scared

by opensummer



Series: let me tell you a story about war [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-01
Updated: 2014-10-01
Packaged: 2018-02-19 12:34:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2388371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/opensummer/pseuds/opensummer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Everything special about you came from a bottle.” Steve knows better then that. Tony should too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	oh, the things we invent when we're scared

**Author's Note:**

> Written pre-Winter Soldier.

Steve grew up in Brooklyn, New York. It was his town even while weak and sickly. He got beat up in every alley, raced boys when he was well, drew and painted when he wasn’t. 

He never learned to run away. He should have between beatings, but he always had Bucky to be his shield and strength. He had Bucky, who would have done anything for him, because Bucky realized the kind of man he could be. 

+

Draw a line in the sand.

This is good. This is kind, right, and true. This is everything good about the world. This is you and your country, red white and blue. 

This is evil. This is cruelty, anger, and fear. This is injustice, everything evil about the world. It’s on the other side of the line. 

Things used to be that simple. 

+

It’s noted in Steve’s files that he’s a Brooklyn kid, with his father’s pension and a chip on his shoulder, often sick, mother five years dead, father ten. No living family, no one to kick up a fuss if he dies. Expendable. His CO’s ink it into to the file because he might only be there because Dr. Erskine pulled some strings but he’s still military. Dot your ‘i’s and cross your ‘t’s. 

They thought he would die in the super-soldier experiment and they’ll move on, with better candidates. Non-asthmatic candidates. He doesn’t, the only successful super-soldier. 

Least you think the project bleach white and boring, Steve was test subject 15.

Take what you will from that. 

+

Steve feels good, strong. He’s tall suddenly. It’s disorienting. Women look at him, really look, instead of their gazes sliding past to Bucky. He understands now, how a bully can be a bully. He didn’t previously. 

He doesn’t like it.

+

They put him in the uniform, surround him with pin-ups have him pretend he’s doing something worthwhile, while on the other side of the world the war rages. 

It’s almost worse then being sidelined for illness. At least that he could understand. 

Steve is a game changer if they would only give him the chance. 

But he’s learning. You have to make your chances and the lead that settles in his stomach when the 107th comes up missing has everything to do with Bucky. 

What he does next is idiotic and brilliant and sure to get him court martialed if he makes it back. 

+

Worth it when Bucky gapes at him and says “I thought you were smaller”. 

Worth it when they pin a medal to his chest and call him brave instead of stupid. Worth it when they give him the most informal command ever and a taskforce meant for PR opportunities, international relations, rather then for results. That he manages both means more missions, more hand shaking and baby kissing. They don’t send him back to the US but the day they liberate Paris he’s front line of the troops marching in and they film all of it. 

A German sniper gets three shots off before they catch him. They hit the armor and bounce off. They catch all of this on camera too, and have it to the distribution centers by the end of the day. This is what the righteous can do, they say, and soldiers who don’t know him take to watching him awestruck, when he’s on base. 

Steve sticks to his squad and uses Bucky as buffer between him and the rest of the world. The cameras eat it up.

+

Steve went to war to prove he could.

The doctors told him they were saving his life, keeping him out of the army.

They don't tell you about war when you signup. Not the realities. Not about the blood or the death or the sound of guns. There were men dying in the trenches, women starving in the streets. They don’t talk about how you’ll run out of food, boots, life. 

They don’t talk about how you’ll wake up one day and think the war is all there is. 

They should. Steve can't get drunk, but dear God he wishes he could. 

+

He dreams of the war, seventy years, weeks later. Bucky on a train falling. Every Nazi stronghold they took down. He dreams of ice, seventy years, a day later and wakes gasping, the air forced from his lungs by the cold. He doesn't recognize the land he fought for anymore. 

His nightmares are of home, Brooklyn unrecognizable. He wakes, doesn’t trash the apartment SHIELD set up for him, and lives his nightmares everyday.

+

There was a movement in the seventies when the world was going to shit and they needed a hero more then ever, a quiet one in certain offices. Bring back Cap' they said. Same uniform, a shield in red, white, and blue. Star'n'stripes. 

The name Steve Rogers was never released to the public. 

They have a mockup of the shield, steel and strong. When Howard Stark hears of this plan, he stops it. Gifts the mockup to Tony, drunk and maudlin, when he next sees him. War changes men, Howard recognizes this but he will not change himself. Says to his son, holding out the shield, like it’s a gift rather then a burden. "Captain America was more then this, better."

Says, "His name was Steve.”

Says, “He was the best man I ever knew."

+

Be careful what you wish for, they say. As Steve's bringing down the jet over the ice he thinks, I wish I had more time. 

Granted son, but not the way you wanted. This isn't what you meant. 

It settles heavy is his stomach. Be careful what you wish for. 

+

They dressed him in red, white and blue, costume to his men’s fatigues, to make him recognizable on the black and white reels the cameraman attached to his company shot. 

They made him a symbol, sold his paraphernalia to finance the war, trading cards and posters. 

Coulson asks for his autograph, face lit up with glee.

(Later he separates the cards out on the table in his apartment, and leaves them there, a testament to how the world has changed.) 

His face is carefully edited out of any of the films before they’re sold, a deliberate choice by the generals. Cap’ is the American people, American power. He cannot be just a man anymore.

+

SHIELD gives him tutors and lessons on the modern world, history and fashion changes until he stops gawking at tattooed and pierced teenagers, their hair dyed into rainbows, wearing scraps he wouldn’t even call clothes. They show him the internet and cell phones, technology and weapons until his head is spinning and the world keeps coming. Children dress up like him on Halloween. Teenagers wear t-shirts with his shield over their hearts and adults talk about him as an exemplar of American virtue. 

This is what he knows. He went in to the ice and the world was at war. He came out ice and the world is at war on a grander scale. His apartment was sold, then demolished. His neighborhood is a place where decent people don’t walk outside at night. Captain America has a monument, shield uplifted, in Arlington National Cemetery. Steve Rogers has a grave marker next to his parents in a plot of land that should have long since been demolished as New York grew. 

Howard bought that land and set it aside in perpetuity. If anyone wants it they’ll have to go through Stark Industries, which owns half the world these days.

His personal effects were claimed by his squad. As they died they donated his art to the Smithsonian and there’s a permanent exhibit of his sketches in the National Gallery in DC, in a room designed specially for them.

+

They declare him fit to live in the real world eventually, after field trips and lessons and a dozen psych evals. 

They set him up with an apartment in his old neighborhood, and a bank account with seventy years of back pay, courtesy of the US army, who he has an appointment with the next week. To a man accustomed to paying with quarters the sum is astronomical. He’s told it’s enough to live comfortably on for the rest of his life. 

+

His army interview is with a general, a man named Ross. The army wants him back he’s told, to his old position and the perks that went with it. A squad and what he did best during the war. He was good at war, strategy and execution. 

But Steve’s seen enough to last a lifetime and the wars America is fighting in this age have nothing to do with justice. He’s old enough now to make that distinction and with the full weight of SHIELD behind him he signs his confidentiality contracts and walks away a free man. 

+

“They keep saying we won”, Steve says to Fury. It’s an accusation. 

The question is what did we lose? Ninety-eight pounds and a weakling, Steve wanted to change the world.

He did. Bruce Banner is his legacy, SHIELD is the aftermath, and the Avengers a repercussion of his actions. 

+

He’s an anachronism. A man out of time, literally and figuratively. 

Fury gives him a direction, a team, then purpose. Captain America still has a role to play. 

+

"I had a date.” Steve said. Already fully recovered from being dead in the water for seventy years, still as strong as he ever was. 

He can’t get drunk. 

Thinks my name is Steve Rogers and I’m twenty-six and ninety-four and everybody I knew is dead or dying. Shakes off the self-pity and carries on, like a good soldier would.


End file.
